Sunday, 13 November 2011

Billy: Farmboy to Ecstatic Corpse I

my father was never a believer in the concept of institution. not just any kind of institution, but the bigger, the most absolute in itself and its belief kind, the one that according to him, oversimplifies something to the point where any sane person, in any given situation but that one, would call a brain-wash factory. when you are introduced to such profound philosophies, as i have come to call them, at the age of ten, you can pretty much tell where you're headed. not at the time, of course.and a christian mother who believes chewing gum is unholy, loudly attacking your father every time he voiced what he believed was the only sensible, consequential dialogue ever uttered in that house, didn't make a logical and well considered point of view very easy. but then again, does that strike you as the House of Eternal Logic?
growing up, i remember smirking at my peers, watching them deal with 'poor-little-rich-boy' problems, as i called them. for some reason, my environment was one that made me believe i was exposed to the more permanent perils in life, the more important ones that people my parents' age spent a good part of their life figuring out, at the same time as being one that, although included two steady incomes, made no investments in any considerable degree of reasonable comfort. the former illusion was partly shattered when i moved to the city after ma died. the latter never was.
that was when i realised what i had really grown up doing. watching the generation before me try to make  sense of of all the complications and 'privileges' that the generation before them had spent a lifetime designing and perfecting, and had finally deemed the (pen)ultimate desire to be satisfied, which could only be achieved at costs nobody would be happy to pay, but everyone would strive to. and that was all i had been doing. watching. this revelation, although being constructive also proved disturbing. i realised i was in a battlefield, with the best sword in the world, and there were thousands of people with shotguns. on the other side. and that didn't make me very happy. they call it a 'psychological breakdown'. its different from a nervous breakdown in that it strangely leaves you capable, or competent, and rehabilitated, but it gives you unpredictable disorders. as in mental. the best way my shrink could put it after three months of it becoming too apparent: i had this massive selective memory stunt going on in my head, at the same time as being bipolar. although this did shed some light on how my first wife died, and why my son was in a wheelchair at the age of six, it also proved to be strangely...therapeutic.

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